Hillary Clinton Commits To Making 2016 a Referendum On Gun Confiscation

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton makes a point to supporters during a speech to members of The International Longshoremen’s Association in Charleston, South Carolina, October 31, 2015. REUTERS/Randall Hill

Democrat Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is apparently following the advice of her handlers, and is going “all in” on making the 2016 Presidential election a referendum on her desire for gun confiscation.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton released her first ad targeting gun control on Tuesday, a month after pledging to take on the powerful U.S. gun lobby.

The 30-second spot uses footage from an Oct. 5 town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, where Clinton said she would pursue expanded background checks and take steps to hold manufacturers accountable for crimes committed with their weapons.

“This epidemic of gun violence knows no boundaries. Between 88 and 92 people a day are killed by guns. We’re better than this. We need to close the loopholes and support universal background checks,” Clinton says in the clip as members of the audience nod in agreement.

“How many people have to die before we actually act? Before we come together as a nation?”

The ad, titled “Together,” will air in the early presidential primary voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire as part of a previously announced purchase, Clinton’s campaign said.

Clinton will speak about gun safety at town halls in Iowa later on Tuesday, the campaign said.

The former U.S. senator from New York announced her plan to curb gun violence days after a gunman killed nine people and wounded another nine on the campus of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

She said she wanted to build a national movement to counter the influence of the National Rifle Association, the leading U.S. gun rights advocacy group.

Clinton’s insistence on making her desire for gun control and indeed, gun confiscation, is a bizarre choice considering the political calculus she and the far left have made is so obviously and demonstrably wrong.

Firearms ownership has surged and jumped all known demographic lines in recent years, creating a phenomenon known as “Gun Culture 2.0.”

Minorities, including people of color and women and younger shooters (down to pre-teens shooting with family members) are increasingly common in gun stores, at firing ranges, in firearms training classes, and joining various shooting sports, all of which are experiencing record growth.

Likewise, despite the fact that the Democrat Party is pushing the “gun violence” meme with the willing accompaniment of the mainstream media, the facts are clear that violent crime is on a long-term four decade decline, and has dropped 50% since the 1990s (when who was in office?). Both criminal homicides and accidents with firearms continue to dip towards historical lows, even as gun ownership is the highest it has ever been in the history of the United States.

Even more bizarre than Clinton’s general anti-gun views are the specific anti-gun talking points she’s chosen to bet her Presidential dreams upon.

They are:

“universal” background checks

closing the “gun show loophole”

stopping “online sales”

banning “assault weapons”

her admission that Australian style gun confiscation of semi-automatic, pump-action, lever-action and other firearms is “worth looking into”

gutting the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) so that gun control supporters can file frivolous lawsuits to bankrupt the firearms industry and gun dealers

“Universal” background checks (UBCs) have always polled great as a vague theory, but like “free money,” it always died on the federal level when legislation is proposed and people see precisely which liberties they give up as a result. UBCs were so broadly written as to prevent safety training, criminalize letting a friend borrow a rifle for hunting, or a brother loaning his sister a firearm for her personal protection after being abused, or even one friend allowing another to shoot his rifle on a farm. Initiatives for UBCs have passed in a handful of states after gun control activists spent massive amounts of money, but law enforcement agencies consider them unconstitutional, and are not only refusing to enforce the law, but are in some instances actively telling citizens to ignore the law.

The “gun show loophole” is another curious and mostly fictional anti-gun battle for Clinton to be fighting.

Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) which account for 90%-95% of all gun sales at a gun shows always conduct background checks, not matter where they sell firearms. The so-called “loophole” is nothing more or less than the practice of allowing a private person who is not a gun dealer to sell his private property to another law-abiding citizen without government interfering.

The exact same thing applies to so-called “online sales.” While gun dealers can sell firearms “online,” they must still ship the firearm to a receiving FFL, who must then have the purchaser complete a standardized NICS background check, in addition to any state requirements. Some of what Clinton is calling “online sales” are nothing more than a variant of digital classified ads, like Craigslist, which are not online in sense, but are person-to-person property sales.

What all three of these things have in common is that Clinton and her allies want each and every firearms transaction logged, in hopes of creating a de facto firearms registry so that they know precisely who had which firearms.

It shows a honestly in their zealotry that the gun control movement has avoided at all costs over the past 50 years.

I simply don’t see a path to victory, however, for a candidate dedicated to the idea of gutting the Bill of Rights, based upon lies, and then setting down a path that is certain to trigger a civil war that her government could not hope to survive, much less win.

Bob Owens is the Editor of BearingArms.com.
Bob is a graduate of roughly 400 hours of professional firearms training classes, including square range and force-on force work with handguns and carbines. He is a past volunteer instructor with Project Appleseed. He most recently received his Vehicle Close Quarters Combat Instructor certification from Centrifuge Training, and is the author of the short e-book, So You Want to Own a Gun.
He can be found on Twitter at bob_owens.
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